"It will take a rally of monumental proportions to save the penis of John McAfee" - Zerohedge, 2017

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

Some news

Gotta do a calc assignment and study for my first Micro test, and thankfully the Canadian market isn't open anyway and I feel pretty good about my present allocations so I can walk away from the computer, but even still here's some news to get you started on the day:

Calculated Risk - auto sales over 17M. And on this news Whitey dumps Ford 4% because blah blah Greece. God it's so damn easy to make money in this market: just don't do what the stupid people are doing.

Don’t be taken in by claims that troika officials are just technocrats explaining to the ignorant Greeks what must be done. These supposed technocrats are in fact fantasists who have disregarded everything we know about macroeconomics, and have been wrong every step of the way. This isn’t about analysis, it’s about power — the power of the creditors to pull the plug on the Greek economy, which persists as long as euro exit is considered unthinkable.

It's also about race, Kruggers. You can see it in the subtext of every article in Bild and every article in FT. It's always framed as the superior Teutons versus the swarthy, thieving, lazy Mediterraneans.

“The creditors should admit that the policies that they put forward over the last five years are flawed,” says Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University. “What they asked for caused a deep depression with long-standing effects, and I don’t think there is any way that Europe’s and Germany’s hands are clean. My own view is that they ought to recognize their complicity and say, ‘Look, the past is the past. We made mistakes. How do we go on from here?’”

The most reasonable solution Stiglitz sees is a write-off of Greece’s debt, or at least a deal that would not require any payments for the next ten or 15 years. In that time, Greece should be given additional aid to jumpstart its economy and return to growth. But the first step would be for the troika to make a painful yet obvious admission: “Austerity hasn’t worked,” Stiglitz says.

Yeah well don't hold your breath buddy. You identified the idiocy of the IMF 14 years ago and nothing changed, and you and me and Kruggers all know it's because the IMF aren't there to make the world a better place. They're there to rule as an unelected kleptocratic elite.

Liquidationist views played an important role in the spread of the Great Depression—with Austrian theorists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter strenuously arguing, in the very depths of that depression, against any attempt to restore ‘sham’ prosperity by expanding credit and the money supply. And these same views are doing their bit to inhibit recovery in the world’s depressed economies at this very moment….

In fact, certain people today still rail on about "sham prosperity by expanding credit" (a.k.a. dishonest systems eventually coming apart at the seams). But look, here comes the first-year economic theory!:

Here’s the problem: As a matter of simple arithmetic, total spending in the economy is necessarily equal to total income (every sale is also a purchase, and vice versa). So if people decide to spend less on investment goods, doesn’t that mean that they must be deciding to spend more on consumption goods—implying that an investment slump should always be accompanied by a corresponding consumption boom? And if so why should there be a rise in unemployment?

Most modern hangover theorists probably don’t even realize this is a problem for their story. Nor did those supposedly deep Austrian theorists answer the riddle. The best that von Hayek or Schumpeter could come up with was the vague suggestion that unemployment was a frictional problem created as the economy transferred workers from a bloated investment goods sector back to the production of consumer goods. (Hence their opposition to any attempt to increase demand: This would leave ‘part of the work of depression undone,’ since mass unemployment was part of the process of ‘adapting the structure of production.’) But in that case, why doesn’t the investment boom—which presumably requires a transfer of workers in the opposite direction—also generate mass unemployment? And anyway, this story bears little resemblance to what actually happens in a recession, when every industry—not just the investment sector—normally contracts….

The hangover theory, then, turns out to be intellectually incoherent; nobody has managed to explain why bad investments in the past require the unemployment of good workers in the present. Yet the theory has powerful emotional appeal. Usually that appeal is strongest for conservatives, who can’t stand the thought that positive action by governments (let alone—horrors!—printing money) can ever be a good idea. Some libertarians extol the Austrian theory, not because they have really thought that theory through, but because they feel the need for some prestigious alternative to the perceived statist implications of Keynesianism. And some people probably are attracted to Austrianism because they imagine that it devalues the intellectual pretensions of economics professors.

When are widely disliked famous people going to learn how Twitter works?!? #AskBobby
— Katie Rogers (@katiearog) June 30, 2015

See Bobby, this is why they put "free speech zones" behind barbed wire and a riot police cordon, ten miles away from anyone. In the internet age fascists can no longer be populists, so don't bother trying.